Axiom Space has announced that they will be creating an office park and manufacturing center at the Houston SpacePort at Ellington Field.
The development is a hopeful sign that a commercial replacement for the International Space Station (ISS), despite the fact that Congress could drag it out, could possibly happen. The United States has a chance to avoid a “space gap” when the ISS reaches the end of its operational life, such as what happened between the end of the spacecraft program and the first launch of the SpaceX commercial crew Dragon mission.
When Jim Bridenstine
James (Jim) Frederick Bridenstine NASA-Canadian agreement shows how Artemis is an international moon shot. NASA selects the following Artemis moonwalkers while SpaceX flies a Starship to break the sound barrier. Chuck Yeager dies at 97 MORE Becoming a NASA administrator was one of the questions he faced to do to maintain a presence in a low orbit around the Earth to the ISS. The idea behind him and NASA experts is to encourage private companies to build their own space station. NASA would provide the necessary support by promising to become an anchor tenant for such orbital facilities. However, the commercial space stations will also have to find private customers.
The problem is that Congress was conspicuously stingy when it comes to real money for this approach. The budget request for the 2020 budget included $ 150 million for commercial space stations. Congress funded support for private laboratories for a total of $ 15 million. The fiscal budget request for 2020 repeats the request for $ 150 million. Congress chose to be slightly broader: $ 17 million.
Congress is not opposed to keeping a human presence in a low orbit around the earth. Indeed, as Space.com reports, the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill extends the operating life of the ISS to 2030. Given the stream of scientific and technological discoveries that have flowed from the orbital laboratory, it’s not hard to see why not. Early critics of the ISS, including the late James Van Allen, were thoroughly discredited.
Congress seems to have no urgency about planning for a post-ISS future. The year 2030 is almost ten years over. The elected politicians do what they do best and kick the can down the road.
Meanwhile, NASA is doing what it can, given the resources allocated, to get a commercial space station industry up and running. An inflatable module called the BEAM, thanks to Bigelow Aerospace, has been attached to the ISS for the past three years. Unfortunately, a number of factors, not least the coronavirus pandemic, forced Bigelow to lay off his entire workforce. Bigelow is now seeking NASA funding for a free-flying space station created with its inflatable modules, ironically using space agency-developed technology called TransHab.
Axiom Space got the nod to attach one of its own modules to the ISS. Axiom did not wait for Congress to raise money for NASA, and announced a facility to manufacture space station modules at the Ellington SpacePort in Houston. The company will also have private space facilities.
In addition to employing 1,000 employees, the new Axiom facility is a commitment to create a commercial space station industry. The fact that a company is willing to invest money to build pieces of a private space station should have an effect on other stakeholders. Axiom must be able to attract commercial customers who are willing to pay for time spent in a research laboratory.
The position of the Axiom facility in Texas is also not coincidental. The delegation to the Texas Congress for obvious reasons supported NASA and increasingly the commercial space sector, which has expanded its presence in the Lone Star State over the past few years. Good old-fashioned policies that lead House members and senators to favor funding projects that mean jobs in their states will be combined with a sound space policy to increase funding in future years.
It’s also probably no accident that the Axiom plant is about a five-hour drive from the growing SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica near the southern tip of Texas. No doubt about SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk
Elon Reeve MuskWorld’s richest people added .8T to their combined prosperity by 2020 Trump ends Obama’s 12-year career as the most admired man: Gallup Apple’s CEO ignored the request to discuss the Tesla sale, Musk says MORE would like to launch completed modules into space using the mighty Starship rocket, and later crew and cargo.
Amid a pandemic, part of a space future is taking shape in South Texas. This time it is driven by the private sector. NASA best jumped on board or would stay behind.
Mark Whittington, who regularly writes about space and politics, has published a political study on space exploration entitled Why is it so difficult to go back to the moon? as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond.” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among others.